Chapter Twelve Grace
Twelve
Grace
Grace stared at Margaret like she’d lost her mind.
“Yay!” Caleb said, clapping his hands together. “This’ll be fun, like a corporate retreat, but with better scenery and significantly more tension. Should we do trust falls? Team building exercises?”
“No,” the rest of the people sitting around the table said simultaneously.
“This’ll be a good learning curve, for both of you,” Abe said. “See it as an extended interview.”
“Oh yes,” Margaret said. “Maybe you can help with dinner? See if you have the chops to feed your guests when the chef can’t get over on a boat, which he definitely can’t now,” she added as she eyed the stormy lake.
“A cook-off? Yes! This is perfect,” Caleb said. “Grace versus Reese. Autumn ingredients. Winner gets…I don’t know, bragging rights? Our undying admiration? Father’s approval, which is basically impossible to get, so good luck with that.”
“But I have a shift tomorrow and—” She was about to say that Zach had school, but then she remembered he’d been suspended until Thursday. “Look, I can’t just—”
“I’m in,” Reese said, his voice cutting through her protest. He was looking at her with something in his eyes that made her stomach flip. Challenge. Amusement. Fire. “Unless you’d rather not, Grace?”
Oh, he did not just throw down that gauntlet.
Grace lifted her chin. “You’re on.”
“Excellent!” Margaret clapped her hands once, decisive. “Let me show you all to your rooms first. Get settled, Grace and Zach can dry off a bit. We’ll reconvene in a couple of hours for dinner prep.” She stood, already moving toward the hallway.
“We call dibs on the tower room!” Caleb announced, linking his arms through Mikkel’s.
“Sorry, Caleb,” Margaret said. “We have a honeymoon couple staying tomorrow night. So we’re keeping the tower off limits for now.” She peered out at the storm. “Assuming this storm passes before they arrive.”
Margaret led them all down a hallway to the rooms. The inn creaked around them, old wood settling, wind beginning to howl through cracks that probably needed weatherstripping. It was shabby and beautiful and exactly the kind of place Grace had dreamed about restoring.
If she could actually afford to restore it, anyway. Which, after Reese’s very public dismantling of her budget, felt significantly less certain than it had this morning.
She could feel him close behind her, could even feel his warm breath on her neck.
“Grace, you’re here,” Margaret said, opening a door to reveal a room with a brass bed, a patchwork quilt and windows overlooking the churning lake. “Zach, honey, you’re right next door to your mom. I imagine you’re too old now to share.”
“Cool.” Zach barely glanced into his assigned room, just threw his rucksack onto the bed. “Actually, can I just hang out in the dining room? I brought my Switch.”
“Of course, dear.” Margaret smiled. “There’s more hot chocolate in the kitchen if you want some.”
Grace craned her neck and watched her son head back down the hallway, making a beeline for the chair closest to where the pretty teen girl was now writing in a notebook. The girl looked up as Zach approached and even from here, Grace could see the interest in her expression.
Great. Her fourteen-year-old was about to discover flirting while Grace was stuck playing Top Chef against a billionaire.
“Reese, you’re on the other side of Grace. Boys,” Margaret said, peering over at her son and his husband, “you get the room at the end. I’ll leave you to get settled. Come to the kitchen when you’re ready, Grace and Reese. We’ll see what you can do with what we’ve got.”
Margaret strolled away, leaving the four of them standing in the hallway.
“So,” Caleb said, breaking the awkward silence. “This is cozy. Two rivals, forced to sleep in rooms across from each other. It’s very Pride and Prejudice meets MasterChef.”
Grace noticed Reese wasn’t listening, he was instead scanning the floor of the hallway like he was searching for something.
“It’s a hallway, darling, not a Jane Austen novel,” Mikkel said.
“Everything is a Jane Austen novel if you have the right attitude,” Tressa said as she appeared, handing them all towels.
“So true.” Caleb turned to Grace and Reese with barely contained glee. “We should do drinks later. After the cook-off. Maybe a murder mystery? I brought cards. We could play charades? Oh! Or we could do a séance…this place definitely has ghosts.”
“A séance, eh?” Reese said, his eyes playful as he looked at Grace. “Maybe we can get in touch with the ghosts of my past. All the competitors who thought they could beat me.”
“Are you so worried about me as competition,” Grace shot back cooly, “that you’re threatening to kill me?”
His mouth curved, slow and wolfish. “Don’t need to, Grace. You’ll bury yourself trying to catch me.”
“Cute. Do you rehearse these villain monologues in the mirror or do they just come naturally?”
Tressa smiled to herself.
“Forget the séance,” Caleb said as he looked at them both, “you two can provide the after-dinner entertainment with your double act. So, back to the drinks. Mikkel will make his famous aquavit cocktails—”
“I will not—”
“—and I can pretend I’m not trapped in my childhood home during a storm with two people who clearly want to throttle each other.” Then he frowned as he looked between Grace and Reese. “Or maybe I’m misinterpreting that look of hate in your eyes. Maybe it’s desire?”
“Caleb, please stop,” Grace said with a sigh.
“I mean, who doesn’t love a bit of forced proximity?” Caleb continued, ignoring her. “It’s how Mikkel and I got together, you know. Trapped in an airport in Copenhagen for fourteen hours. By hour six, we were going to either kill each other or fall in love.”
“I almost picked the killing option,” Mikkel said dryly.
“But you didn’t and now look at us! Married and happy.”
“Caleb!” Grace said, giving him a warning look as Reese looked on, amused.
Caleb started backing toward his room, hands up. “Fine, fine. See you all at the cook-off. May the best chef win. My money’s on Grace, by the way. No offense, Reese. But have you tasted her cookies?”
“Caleb!” Mikkel hissed as the group froze at the innuendo.
“Nope, I haven’t had the pleasure of Grace’s cookies yet,” Reese said, his eyes on Grace.
Grace escaped into her room before Caleb could suggest anything else ridiculous, closing the door firmly behind her.
She took some deep breaths, then moved to the window, watching the storm tear across the lake.
Trees bent nearly double, rain slashing sideways, the water a roiling mass of gray and white.
It was beautiful in a violent, uncontrollable way. Like everything in her life right now.
She’d done well with the presentation. She knew she had. The sketches had landed exactly how she’d hoped and Margaret’s face when she’d talked about keeping the Blackwell family photos on the walls—that had been a real connection.
But then Reese had started asking questions and all her careful projections had looked exactly like what they were: optimistic at best, delusional at worst.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen to see it was Mabel. Great, now she had to deal with her mom.
“Hi, Mom,” Grace answered, sinking onto the edge of the bed.
“Grace! I just saw Sophie, she said Luke can’t collect you. Are you okay? Is Zach with you? I saw on that Find My app thingy he’s not at school.”
“We’re fine. And yes, we’re stuck on the island until the storm passes, but we’re safe. He—he’s been suspended.”
“No! Why?”
“Fight. I’ll explain when I’m back.”
“You tell him his grandma is very angry at him.” A pause. Then: “How did the presentation go?”
Grace closed her eyes. “Really well, actually. I think they liked my vision for the place.”
“Your vision.” Her mother’s tone carried that particular edge that meant a lecture was incoming. “You know what I think? I think this storm is God’s way of telling you not to try to buy that inn.”
“Mom—”
“Grace, honey, I need you to really think about what you’re doing. Buying an inn is a massive undertaking. The debt alone—”
“I know about the debt, Mom.”
“And what happens when something goes wrong? When you need a new roof or the plumbing fails or—”
“I have contingencies.” Sort of. Kind of. Not as many as Reese had pointed out she should have.
“Do you? Because from what I can gather, you’re putting everything into this.
Your savings, a loan that’ll no doubt take decades to pay off.
And for what? To serve other people for the rest of your life, just in a different location?
Aren’t you the one who said waitressing and cleaning wasn’t what you wanted to do with your life when I mentioned you owning the café one day?
Isn’t owning an inn just a more stressful version of that? ”
Grace felt something crack in her chest. “That’s not—it’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it? You’ll still be the one cleaning rooms and cooking meals and smiling at guests even when you’re exhausted. The only difference is the risk will all be on you instead of on me.”
“I can handle risk.”
“Can you? Like how you handled Zach’s father walking out.”
Grace went very still, putting her hand to her chest, memories of those tear-drenched nights coming back to her as her mother held her. “Mom. Come on.”
“Sorry, darling,” her mother said, her voice gentler now.
“I didn’t mean for that to sound like it did, you’re a wonderful mother, truly.
And there’s no denying, you’re damn good at what you do at the café, the way you’ve built up the catering business and updated the systems. It’s been quite something to watch.
So it’s not that I don’t think you’re capable.
It’s just…a whole inn, Grace! If this is about taking control, you’ll have the chance to run the café one day, maybe even open up a franchise.
It’s what you know, so you’re bound to make a success of it.
Why would you throw that away for something so… uncertain?”